When Oksana and her family move from the Ukraine to Florida to begin a new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her cranky mother sits at home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets from men. All Oksana wants is to be as far away from her family as possible, to have friends, and to be normal—and though she...

Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five ‘Tales of Belkin’ contrasts with Pushkin's dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in ‘The Queen of Spades’ and his...

The gritty memoir of a former US Marine and Presidential Guard, who, after being unjustly held and abused in a Russian gulag for three years and freed in a high-profile prisoner exchange, seeks revenge against his former Russian captors by volunteering to fight in Ukraine.

There are war stories, but there are also love stories. Stories of aging romantics in modern Ukraine, and of modern Ukrainians in Vienna and Brooklyn, a fantastical tale set on a mysterious island where people never die, a wild lovers' romp through modern-day Ukraine, a sobering account of an American war photographer, and a post-modern tale of a botanist in love. Some of these stories have...

‘How does a comedian become the face of a nation's fight for survival? In VZ, celebrated Russian author Dmitry Bykov unpacks the extraordinary rise of Vladimir Zelenskyi--from a TV star to a wartime leader defying a global superpower. With wit and razor-sharp insight, Bykov dives into the moments that shaped Zelenskyi's improbable journey, revealing the man behind the headlines. This is not...

Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter--the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise--and tell of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a his-tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son...

The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Belkin; Peter the Great's Blackamoor; The Captain's Daughter.

Eight stories, eight women, an emotional multitude. In her short-story collection, Birthday, Jana Egle distinctly straps the male presence into the back seat and lets the female voice ring free. Not to be taken as ‘a book for women’ or ‘women's literature,’ the themes and situations in Birthday present a familiar, yet uneasy, vantage point for any reader, regardless of personal, real-life...

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an...

The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešic's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life. With a diverse and unusual perspective, she...

Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu's poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush,...

The Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released?a sober and, more or less, healthy man?after treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him...